Justice Clarence Thomas’ lament: US more ‘sensitive’ to race than in 1960’s

Americans are more “conscious” of racial differences than they were in the turbulent 1960’s, and overly “sensitive” in reacting to slights, according to US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The outspoken conservative justice, the second African-American to serve on the high court, spoke to a chapel service at a Christian school in Florida, Palm Beach Atlantic University, and his remarks were first reported by Yahoo News.

Clarence Thomas

“My sadness is that we are probably today more race and difference conscious than I was in the 1960’s when I went to school,” Thomas said.

Thomas grew up in a then-segregated Georgia. He was a teenager at the time of the deadly riot when James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi, and when Alabama Gov. George Wallace stood “at the schoolhouse door” trying to block the first black students from attending the University of Alabama.

“To my knowledge, I was the first black kid in Savannah to go to a white school,” he said. “Rarely did the issue of race come up. Now name a day it doesn’t come up.

“Differences in race, differences in sex, somebody doesn’t look at you right, somebody says something. Everybody is sensitive. If I had been as sensitive as that in the 1960’s, I’d still be in Savannah.”

Thomas left Savannah to attend the Yale Law School. He was nominated to the Supreme Court by President George H.W. Bush, succeeding civil rights pioneer Thurgood Marshall. Thomas was barely confirmed, on a 52-48 vote, after a Senate confirmation battle that centered on allegations of sexual harassment.

Thomas is still highly conscious and sensitive about that battle.

“The worse I have been treated was by northern white liberal elites, the absolute worst I have ever been treated,” he told Florida students. “The worst things that have been done to me, the worst things that have been said about me, (were) by northern liberal elites, not the people of Savannah.”

Thomas has voted, as a justice, to limit and roll back affirmative action and to scuttle a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

He has espoused a bootstraps philosophy, and did so again at Palm Beach Atlantic.

“Every person in this room has endured a slight,” he said. “Every person. Somebody has said something that has hurt their feelings or did something to them — left them out.